Police Aviation News 292 August 2020 1 ©Police Aviation Research Issue 292 August 2020 Police Aviation News 292 August 2020 2 LAW ENFORCEMENT INTERNATIONAL COLOGNE: We hope that the current COVID-19 situation will allow us to hold a half day Special Conference as part of upcoming European Rotors event in Cologne during November 2020. The current plan includes presentations from 1400hrs to 1800hrs on Tuesday 10 November 2020. The session is planned to open with a Keynote speech from Col. Torsten Hallmann of the Bun- despolizei based at Sanct Augustin followed by presentations from regular PAvCon Europe speakers from the Netherlands and Belgium. This will primarily be a European Rotors event with PAvCon input. www.europeanrotors.eu AUSTRALIA WESTERN AUSTRALIA: In April 2019 the Western Australia (WA) police department announced that they would be getting an additional helicopter thanks to $27M of new funding to replace the depart- ment's 28-year-old Kawasaki BK117B, Polair 61. At that time the decision on a make or model for the new helicopter was not determined. They also operated an AS365N3+ and three fixed-wing aircraft. Last month it was announced that Airbus Helicopters has received an order from the Western Australia police for a single five-bladed H145 helicopter for airborne missions, making it the first Australian operator of the type. No indication of a delivery schedule has been made public, but the manufacturer has indicated an end-September timeline for Airbus Helicopters to begin deliveries of the certified five-bladed H145. The H145 will be based in Perth, will offer capabilities for the WA police, including night vision goggle compatibility, as well as single-pilot and instrument flight rules over a search area of nearly 1 million square-miles. The H145 will have a fully integrated on-board police mission system, alongside Airbus’s Helionix avionics suite and a 4-axis autopilot system, which will significantly reduce crew workload. The police BK117B, VH-WAH, first entered service in Japan in 1990, before it was delivered to the police force two years later. Apart from the two rotorcraft, the WA police also operates three Pilatus PC-12s, and one GippsAero GA8 Airvan. CANADA RCMP: Often when a story is run, someone with intimate knowledge of it will later fill in some details that would have been really valuable in the original piece, but do not warrant a new article, or follow-up story. The story about the police helicopter that hit a police drone in northern Cana- da in February but only got reported in June appeared bland but there are un- derlying questions. A report from the Canadian Transportation Safety Report (TSB) stated that both aircraft were in- volved in a “police operation” but what we didn’t know until later is that they were employed over a flashpoint local protest against a controversial pipeline through territory claimed by indigenous peoples. The fact that the same opera- tor oversaw both craft should have made operations safer, but it seems that supposition was wrong. © RCMP COVER: Mixed traffic. In the wake of the unplanned drone v helicopter incident in Canada earlier this year (page 2) a planned series of trials has been started by DASA/QinetiQ/ETPS in the UK aimed at drones and helicopters work- ing together efficiently and safely. It may be a military programme but the lessons learned will eventually feed through to the civilian world. See page 28. (The cover image ©QintetiQ has been subject to Photoshop manipulation} Police Aviation News 292 August 2020 3 Police Aviation News is published monthly by POLICE AVIATION RESEARCH, 7 Windmill Close, Honey Lane, Waltham Abbey, Essex EN9 3BQ UK. Contacts: Cell: +44 7778 296650 Skype: BrynElliott or +44 20 8144 1914 E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected] Police Aviation Research Airborne Public Safety Association Member since 1994—Corporate Member since 2014 SPONSORS Avalex www.avalex.com Britannia 2000 Holdings www.b2kholdings.co.uk FLIR Systems www.flir.com L3 Harris/Wescam www.wescam.com RDDS www.rdds.co.uk Trakka Systems www.trakkasystems.com Airborne Public Safety Association www.publicsafetyaviation.org The severity of the damage was understated originally. The drone was known to be destroyed but it was not appreciated that the damage to the helicopter was as bad as it turned out. The original story said the pilot felt a vibration and landed safely on a road with superficial damage to the main blades, the tail boom and tail rotor. It was clearly more severe than the initial reports suggested in that the AS350 helicopter was deemed not airworthy and remained grounded in the snow and ice of a Canadian winter until it was possible to arrange for a larger helicopter to come along and lift the helicopter out. This coming together of a ‘cheap’ $100,000 drone and a real helicopter required tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of retrieval costs and repairs. The drone was of course ‘reduced to spares’ scattered in the forest. [Russ Niles, AvWeb] Ed: Some people are realising that drones are not always the cheap option and that the costs associated with the February incident in Canada have migrated into the stratosphere are always a threat to opera- tions. COLOMBIA NATIONAL POLICE: Trakka has delivered a Total Surveillance Solution Package for the Colombian National Police to support the Directorate of Avi- ation, Halcon Group. The Total Surveil- lance Solutions Package is comprised of the TrakkaCam TC-300 Multi-sensor Camera System, TrakkaMap TM-100 Mission Management, Moving Map, and recording system, and the TrakkaBeam A800 Searchlight. The systems have been installed and are operational in multiple Latin American countries. The Colombian National Police, Direc- torate of Aviation, Halcon Group, re- cently acquired two Total Surveillance Solutions Packages for their existing Bell 206 JetRanger helicopters, one of which has been operating over the cit- ies of Bogotá and Bucaramanga since March 2020. The National Police operate 104 air- craft of which 65 are a range of heli- © Trakka copters. Police Aviation News 292 August 2020 4 ESTONIA AIR FORCE: Late last month the country held its Victory Parade to mark the 101st anniversary of the Estonian Air Force. At the event it was announced that the Robinson R44 helicopters operated by them are to be retired. Estonia was donated four R44 helicopters by the US Government in 2002. Two are Police specification and carry FLIR Systems’ Ultra 8000 Thermal Imaging camera and loudspeakers. In 2012, two of the four helicopters were upgraded for night vision training by Rebtech and Night Flight Concepts. The other two are Clipper variants with floats, and it is one of these was the first to be retired. The first has been donated to Lennundusmuuseum (the Estonian Aviation Museum) eight miles south of Tartu, and the other three are planned to be retired at the rate of one per year. Given a fleet of four, that suggests the last will be retired in 2023. The Police and Border Guard Aviation Group operate three civil registered Leonardo AW139 helicopters acquired a decade ago. [Helihub] MEXICO YUKATAN: Trakka USA, LLC has announced the delivery of Trakka’s Total Surveillance Solution Package in Yucatan, Mexico to support the operations of public security. The Total Surveillance Solutions Package is comprised of the TrakkaCam TC-300 Multi-sensor Camera System, TrakkaMap TM-100 Mis- sion Management, Moving Map, and recording system, and the TrakkaBeam A800 Searchlight were for installation in a Bell 429 helicopter. The Secretariat of Public Security in Yucatan, Mexico has been operating the Bell 429 helicopter integrat- ed with the Total Surveillance Solutions Package for medical evacuations and SAR missions since Febru- ary 2020. Police Aviation News 292 August 2020 5 “We are extremely satisfied with the positive response from the Secretary of Public Safety. Trakka is proud to support our end-user in achieving the maximum performance of the Total Surveillance Solutions Package in their day-to-day operations,” said Gerardo Castelblanco, BD-Latin America of Trakka Sys- tems. www.trakkasystems.com. Ed: Primarily a police resource the Bell 429 has been used in the patient transfer role a few times since it entered service with the Yucatán Government in January 2020. (Gobierno de Mexico) Early July was marked by two instances of jet aircraft being used for drug running into Mexico. On July 2 a burned out 1968 Grumman G-1159 Gulfstream IISP XB -NRX plane was found by Mexican law enforcement officers at Mapastepec, Mexico. The wreck was found on a grassed area and the authorities are happy that it had been used for transporting drugs prior to being destroyed. The plane was empty, and no occu- © Facebook/Twitter pants were found at the site. There is some question over whether a military helicopter caused the demise of another light business jet a few days later. Sources state that gunnery from the armed forces helicopter caused the aircraft to make an emergency landing on the Chunhuhub-José María Morelos highway section, in the central-western re- gion of Quintana Roo. The BAe 125 jet XB-RCM came down on the highway and the cockpit area was set on fire leading to the whole cabin area being consumed. Other versions of the event suggest that the jet landed on the highway and that the occupants unloaded a shipment of drugs into a road vehicle and fled the scene, leaving the aircraft on fire. They abandoned the vehicle some kilometres along the road. Ed: As starkly illustrated by the Aviation Safety Network data the BAe/Hawker Siddeley 125 appears to be the type of choice for drug smuggling.